BY MATT BERG
& CROOKED MEDIA

FRIDAY
NOVEMBER 22, 2024

This is good, actually.... It's like giving someone an unplugged controller.” 

— [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)]([link removed]), on putting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) in charge of a special new subcommittee on government spending. 

DOGE OF DOOM

Just when you thought that DOGE commission led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy couldn’t get dumber, MAGA bomb-thrower Marjorie Taylor Greene is joining the party. 

- Elon Musk, the centibillionaire conspiracy theorist and self-styled “first buddy,” is busily drawing up plans to slash the size of government with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, alongside bio-tech rich guy Vivek Ramaswamy — who’s mulled cutting [1 million jobs]([link removed]) from the federal payroll. 

- For starters, they want all federal employees to return to the office five days a week, in hopes of creating a wave of voluntary resignations. They also want to use “advanced technology” (uh, huh?) to scan for regulations for Trump to nullify en masse. That will, they wrote in a recent [Wall Street Journal OpEd]([link removed]), make the employees who previously enforced those regulations obsolete. Can they actually get any of this done? It’s hard to say. Federal employee workers unions are already gearing [up for a fight]([link removed]). But Musk and Ramaswamy are boasting that they believe the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will back them up.
 

- They’ll also get backup in Congress — although perhaps not the most competent kind. That’s because the backup will be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the fire-breathing MAGA nutjob who peddles conspiracy theories about [Jewish space lasers]([link removed]) and told Muslim congresswomen to “[go back to the Middle East]([link removed])” because they weren’t sworn in on a Bible. She’s now expected to lead a House Oversight subcommittee that will work with DOGE.

 
What will Greene actually do? From the look of things, she’ll yell at people and try to get them fired. That’s according to her own early statements and, of course, her long history of yelling at people, and [trying to get them fired]([link removed]). 

- “The bureaucrats who don’t do their job, fail audits like in the Pentagon and don’t know where billions of dollars are going, will be getting a pink slip,” Greene said in a statement. Her subcommittee will provide “transparency and truth to the American people through hearings,” she told Fox News. That appears to mean she’ll drag government employees in to testify about their jobs and then make a spectacle of herself. 

- Greene has never been allowed to hold the gavel in any House committee before. In fact, she’s proven so disruptive that she was once stripped of her [committee assignments completely]([link removed]). In September, Greene [introduced an amendment]([link removed]) to cut Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s salary to $1 because “he’s destroying our military.” In another hearing, she brought out sexually explicit poster-board images of President Biden’s son, Hunter, with the warning: “Parental discretion advised.” Her involvement signals chaos, salacious headlines, toxic insults, acrimony, and “Real Housewives” energy — but not thoughtful discourse about government spending.

- On the bright side, she’ll probably just help screw the whole thing up, according to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who called Greene’s assignment “good, actually,” in a social media post, comparing it to handing someone an unplugged video game controller. 

- Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) slammed DOGE and sarcastically dismissed Greene in comments to What A Day. “So now a noted student of American government, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, will chair a subcommittee to work with two unvetted billionaires who stand to receive billions more in government contracts and subsidies from the government under Trump,” Raskin said. 

“The government belongs to the people, not the billionaire oligarchs,”​Raskin said.​

 

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WHAT ELSE?

[Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s disgraced former]([link removed]) pick for Attorney General who quit his job as a House member representing Florida, said he won’t rejoin Congress next year despite winning the last election. Instead, Gaetz said he’ll do “whatever [Trump] asks of me.” Ominous! Meanwhile, he’s selling videos for $500 a pop on Cameo, aka, the last refuge of the MAGA damned. 
 
[Trump’s criminal sentencing in New York over]([link removed]) his hush-money conviction was officially put on hold by Judge Juan Merchan. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has asked Merchan to freeze Trump’s case for four years, rather than simply dismiss it. Man, 34 felonies used to mean something.
 
[Russia fired a new hypersonic missile at Ukraine]([link removed]) on Thursday in what observers interpreted as a warning to the West. 
 
[A review of 38,000 posts by Elon Musk on X/Twitter]([link removed]) by The Economist shows the rightward lurch of the world’s richest man, as his focus shifted from climate change and clean energy to immigration and free speech. But… is it a “rightward lurch,” or just a continued commitment to only caring about issues that personally enrich him? You be the judge!
 
[Trump is staffing his future White House with]([link removed]) (you guessed it!) the personnel database of Project 2025, the infamous rightwing blueprint to remake America that Trump repeatedly disavowed on the campaign trail. Trump? Lying? Well now we’ve seen it all. 
 
[Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon,]([link removed]) is likely to retake his former position at the helm of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to Politico. If so, he’s expected to cut the department’s funding and undo Joe Biden’s fair housing policies.

[Trump picked hedge fund manager Scott Bessent]([link removed]) to be Treasury Secretary. 

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[Bluesky is rapidly emerging as a counterweight]([link removed]) to Elon-“I’m-dark-MAGA”-Musk’s X, with downloads rising 430 percent during election week. Who’d have thought it might be nice to see the posts from people you actually follow, instead of creatine tips and conspiracy theories from whichever manosphere ultra-bro gets pumped into your feed by Musk’s algorithm. 

[The number of Italian same-sex civil unions rose to a six-year high]([link removed]), defying the country’s conservative government’s attempts to make it more difficult for same-sex couples to start families. Heyyy, far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni: Basta!

 
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